New Cyber Worlds Provide Possible Learning Landscapes

They might not show
up in the school construction budget, but some pretty odd structures
are being built to house students these days. Among them: tomato
greenhouses floating in the sky, a 19th-century river town grappling
with a mysterious epidemic, and odd meeting places that look like set
diagrams from "Star Trek."

These are educational spaces of a special sort: multiple-user
dimensions, or MUDs—worlds that exist only in cyberspace. And a
handful of pioneering educators are using them to tickle the
imaginations of teens who have grown up on video games.

Other MUDs are devised mainly for socializing and playing games.
Now, partnerships of researchers and educators—with support in
some cases from Internet entrepreneurs—have begun to erect them
for an educational purpose.

The use of MUDs in the classroom is only in the nascent stage, with
no conclusive research yet on the tool's effectiveness. And the
technique, in the end, may prove either too expensive or too
technically challenging to come into wide usage.

MUDs are digital creations that reside, literally, on the computer
servers that host them. Users visit these worlds over the Internet. A
central characteristic of MUDs is that they allow many users, hundreds
of them, to log on and participate simultaneously.

Since the 1980s, hobbyists and Internet companies have designed MUDs
as venues for uninhibited chatting and game-playing, in settings that
can be prosaic or draped in elaborate trappings— from medieval
and magical to science fiction. Originally, these online worlds were
created only out of text that described their rooms and realms as
visitors traveled through them.

But MUDs have become increasingly visual and interactive
experiences. Commercial multiplayer games have developed three-
dimensional landscapes and buildings that mimic the latest computer and
video games. Unlike such games, the MUDs allow hosts of users to take
part as "avatars," digital personages that represent people in the game
world.

Players control their avatars and communicate through them with
other avatars they meet, as they wander the vast online realms. Avatars
can also chat with computer-controlled "nonplayer characters." Avatars
and characters can often affect one another and manipulate objects in
the world—say, to engage in combat or collect magical items.

Some educators have long thought that avatars could be a tool for
education, too. If game worlds can entice participants to pay
subscription fees and become "inhabitants" for months or even years,
the thinking goes, perhaps educational worlds can keep teenagers'
attention through 50 minutes of social studies class.

But acceptance of MUDs in the classroom has been slow, in part
because it has seemed like risky terrain for schools to traverse.

"It makes a lot of people
uncomfortable. People associate it with Dungeons and Dragons," the
controversial role-playing game that has inspired many of the MUD
games, said David Reuss, a researcher at George Mason University in
Fairfax, Va. And some MUD games and chat-oriented worlds are laced with
violence and sexual talk, not to mention contact with adults.

A growing number of educators and education researchers, including
Mr. Reuss, have found ways to craft tamer and safer MUDs for use in
middle schools and high schools.

It remains unclear, though, whether the constricted and visually
limited MUDs that educators can afford to develop will appeal to
video-game-fed youngsters, whether teachers and schools will accept
them widely, and whether they can achieve educators' pedagogical
goals.

Trouble in River City

In Gunston Middle School here in Arlington, Va., a 7th grade class
of 17 students recently used a prototype MUD to learn about the
scientific method.

In a computer lab at the 677-student school, the students logged on
and, as avatars, entered River City, a fictitious prairie town set in
the 1890s. From walking around and chatting with a few inhabitants,
they heard about a mysterious sickness afflicting the city.

The students, working in pairs for two weeks, wrestled with the
epidemiological mystery by collecting data—visiting the River
City hospital, conversing with other characters, and "collecting" water
samples from 11 River City locations, examining the samples for cholera
and coliform bacteria.

On a run-through of the game last week, avatars "Patty" and
"Hippolyta" met each other in town and shared information.

"I like mystery. I liked solving the problem," Yiseul Jeon, one of
two 13-year-old girls controlling the cyber characters, said as she
played the game as Hippolyta. Dahia Molina, who was in charge of Patty,
said "I like everything" about the project, including choosing Patty's
color, chatting on- screen with her collaborator, and climbing stairs
to the town spa, which commands a view of the make-believe
landscape.

The system, called MUVEES, for Multi-User Virtual Environment
Experiential Simulator, was devised by a team at nearby George Mason
University with two years of funding from the National Science
Foundation.

The screen layout of the system consists principally of a
"navigation space," which shows the 3-D environment the avatar is
facing and a text area that is used for typing in and reading dialogue
with other avatars and characters in the MUD. Other buttons on screen
allow users to quickly express happiness, sadness, and
greetings—generating appropriate text and body movements by the
avatar.

When avatars approach, the nonplayer characters talk to them. Along
with useful information, these other characters throw out a few red
herrings, something a scientist must learn to recognize and contend
with, said Jennifer Powell, the 7th graders' science teacher. Her
students took notes in real-world notebooks.

She had teams of two working on the six computers during the
project, which took eight days.

To Ms. Powell, who helped devise the project, the real lesson was
"experimental design, really the scientific method," which includes
making hypotheses and collecting data.

"The best way to get things across to kids is to put it in a story,"
Ms. Powell said. For example, some relatively dense scientific
information was presented as the lost research notes of two previous
researchers in the town. When students stumbled across the notes, they
pored over them.

Benefits and Challenges

Other MUD designs have employed commercial systems normally used for
games, corporate training, and marketing. For example, 80 educational
institutions, including some secondary schools, have built MUDs in the
Active Worlds Educational Universe, using software and server space
donated by Activeworlds Corp., based in Newburyport, Mass.

In one related project, some New York high school students are
learning to make 3- D worlds, including one with virtual 3-D
"greenhouses" that display information about tomatoes.

While encouraged by such stirrings of activity, developers and
educators who are working with MUDs acknowledge that they face a tough
challenge in attracting entrepreneurs and foundations to invest the
large sums needed to make high-quality educational tools.

Tailoring MUDs precisely to strengthen a specific area of the
curriculum—and for a particular state— inevitably shrinks
the size of the market for that tool. That market is further diminished
by many educators' aversion to unfamiliar technologies, said Sasha
Barab, a professor at Indiana University-Bloomington who develops
educational MUDs for high school students.

Games, by contrast, are written to tweak the fancy of general
audiences, without having to meet academic standards—which means
investments in graphics can be recouped by sales to sizable
audiences.

Yet developers that don't focus on school academic standards won't
even get a hearing from educators. "If were going to have any impact,
we've got to connect what we're doing to local academic standards," Mr.
Barab said. "Otherwise, we don't have really a foot in the door."

Coverage of technology is supported in part by the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Vol. 21, Issue 30, Page 8

Published in Print: April 10, 2002, as New Cyber Worlds Provide Possible Learning Landscapes

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